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Month: May 2010

Last weekend we had a fantastic event in Skopje that brought together almost the whole Balkan in Macedonia. Together with David Tenser we were there to learn more about our community and present SUMO and our big rewrite. Later we had the chance to talk to the bigger audience about the role of support within Mozilla and what it means to support 400 million users. Mapping names to faces after chatting online for some time is always nice and there was plenty of chance for that as well.

I like to think that the Balkans event was as fun as it was productive. For us it’s important to reach as many people in their native language as possible, especially with support and that’s a goal we share with our localizers. We already had locale leaders for half of the languages spoken in the Balkan region, big thanks to Aleksandar, Edo, Milos and smo; and we added 3 more with Bulgarian, Greek and Mazedonian, another big thanks to Emil, Martin, Pierros, Contanton and Gorjan. This event was a first in that the locale communities set goals for themselves to track their progress. There we didn’t but here I pledge that I’ll try everything I can to help the locale communities to bring support to people in their native language. And hopefully we will have localized support for the top 20 articles in every language spoken in the Balkans by the end of the year 🙂

And a huge thanks to William and especially Gorjan (who is 17!), for making the Balkans meeting such an amazing event!

Patricia was so kind to translate this into Belorussian. How cool is that?! Check it out here:Belorussian by PC

So, are Americans different from Germans? Or from dutch, or from Brazilians? Okay, they probably are to some point, but the question for the SUMO team is: do Americans have the same questions about Firefox as Germans or Spanish or any other language group? Currently we do assume that, but we didn’t actually back that up with data. The process of doing so is quite tedious, but we have 300 articles in our knowledge base and if it turns out that the top 20 articles in Spanish are different from the top 20 articles in English our localizers can make much better decisions about which article to localize or work on next. Ideally we would send out weekly rankings to our localizers and we will hopefully be able do so with Kitsune, the new KB project, in the meantime however we are working on making sense of the data we have and we will share that with localizers soon.

If you are a localizer and want to know about the popularity of an article, just ask in our contributor forums, I’ll try to come up with an answer quickly.